


a matter of worse or of better

by kitseybarbours



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst with a Happy Ending, Cancer, Dysfunctional Relationships, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-11 18:07:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12940815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitseybarbours/pseuds/kitseybarbours
Summary: “You’re not going to die,” says Ben, automatic, monotone. His eyes are glued to the table, his hands around his coffee mug. When he takes them away the palms will be red, they will hurt. “You’re not going to die."“I might. He did."“You’re not him.”“I’m enough of him for it to count. Our cells. Our DNA. It’s hereditary. The predisposition, at least.” Hux’s gaze forces Ben to look up. “Did you know you could pass on not just your life, but your death, to your children?”





	a matter of worse or of better

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2017 Kylux Reverse Bang based on an art prompt by the lovely [invadxrs](http://invadxrs.tumblr.com/), which was in turn based on [The Bed Song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sW4dwXXX7Q) by Amanda Palmer! It was so wonderful to work with Jay, and to have the unexpected pleasure of meeting them in the autumn as well; all their beautiful art for this fic will be linked in the end notes.
> 
> Before we get started: warnings for colossal (and non-sexy) daddy issues, as well as mentions of vomiting, disordered eating due to chemotherapy, and other side effects of cancer and treatment. (Thank you to [Ellstra](http://ellstra.tumblr.com/) for the medical advice; nonetheless, much fudging was done and all inaccuracies are mine.) There is also a scene involving a non-consensual cigarette burn in the third section. I will reiterate that — shockingly for me, I know — _there is no MCD in this fic._

* * *

 

“It’s hard to believe it’s almost over, isn’t it?”

“Mm. Four years.”

Ben nestles his nose into his boyfriend’s short soft hair. “We’re supposed to be grown-ups now.”

Hux shifts in his arms. “Tomorrow, we’ll get pieces of paper that prove it, and then we’ll wave them at people until they give us jobs. _Please, sir, look — there’s Latin on it…”_

They snicker. The fairy lights they hung as a temporary fix the last time the overhead light burnt out — near Christmas, conveniently enough — cast their sweet, warm glow above and around them. The main bulb in the centre of the ceiling is still dark: they’ll have to change it by tomorrow or they won’t get their whole deposit back. Ben files that away for later.

“You’re gonna have better luck than me,” he opines. _“Your_ Latin says you’re qualified to, like, argue us out of wars and shit.”

“Not yet,” Hux objects. “My master’s, still.”

“Look at you, arguing already. Skip the master’s, you don’t need it.” Ben sucks his gut in when Hux punches it, laughing. _“My_ Latin says that I’m good at flinging paint at a canvas.”

Hux guffaws, the way he only laughs when he’s drunk. Ben wishes he laughed more, otherwise. “And shit.”

“And shit. Not literally. Not yet, at least.”

“Maybe one day.”

“Yeah. Maybe. In this economy, who knows.”

Upstairs, the noise of a party. A bit early to celebrate, Ben thinks: hangovers at the commencement ceremony practically guaranteed. He’s content to be where he is. He’s not sure if he can say the same of Hux, but he can hope. He does.

Ben tightens his arms around him. “This sleeping bag is really small, you know.”

“We had to pack up the bed,” Hux insists. “There’s too much to do tomorrow; it was better to get it out of the way.”

“I’m just saying, you could’ve bought a bigger one.”

“Well, I didn’t know I’d one day be trying to fit a man the size of a _refrigerator_ inside it when I bought it, did I?” An elbow to Ben’s ribs.

“You’re just jealous.” Ben presses a kiss to his neck, wraps one big hand clean around Hux’s bicep. “Noodle boy.”

“Shut it.” Hux squirms from his grip.

“We’ll have a bigger bed in the next place.”

They’re moving in together this summer. They’ve been living together since their second year, when Hux transferred here from England, but that’s only been as roommates. Now, they’ll be living _together,_ as a couple, both their names on the lease. Ben can’t wait to have their own space, their own bedroom, their own kitchen, for God’s sake, and no one else’s congealing food in the fridge. He can’t wait to have _Hux;_ to start a life with him.

“The next place,” Hux repeats. “Yeah.”

He thinks the apartment they’ve found is going to be too small. He thinks the bathroom looks dirty, and he thinks the rent is too high. Ben has protested, told him that they’re _supposed_ to live like this at this stage in their lives, that this is how they do things in the ol’ U.S. of A. He’s tried to persuade him that it’s going to be _fun._ Hux has, generally, sighed, and muttered about slumming it, but he relented, in the end. It’ll be their place, Ben keeps reminding him, and that’s what really matters.

“Are you excited?” Ben asks him. “About the move.”

Hux bites his lip. “Yeah,” he says, just a moment too late.

Ben feels their previous ease dissipating. Inside, he sighs. Their teasing banter has become less frequent, lately, and Hux — Hux has never been demonstrative, but he seems even less receptive lately, even less affectionate. Ben thinks it’s just stress — finals and grad, the upcoming move. He hopes it’s just stress, and not him.

“Yeah?” Slowly, Ben removes his arm from around Hux’s waist. He hasn’t thrown it off, but Ben can feel him receding beneath it, pulling away as glacier-slowly as he can. “Are you sure?”

“Yes. Yes, Ben.” Hux’s tone is sharper now, without the drunken looseness. Amazing how quickly he can sober up when he wants to. He shifts, yawns. Surely it isn’t faked. “Can we…talk about this later, though? I’m tired. It’s an early day tomorrow; we should get to bed.”

The nightstand has already been moved out of their room and into the U-Haul parked behind the residence tower. The digital clock is plugged in on the floor — their alarm for tomorrow morning — and it’s in Ben’s direct line of sight. It’s only eleven forty-five.

“Oh. Uh — yeah. Yeah, if you’re tired. But are you sure you don’t want to —?”

They had bought some novelty flavoured condoms earlier in the week, and were joking about using them the night before grad: a final wild-and-crazy college experience (about as wild-and-crazy as either of them ever got). But Ben had mentioned them earlier tonight, and Hux had shied away; “I’ll think about it, let’s talk about it later.” Later Ben had asked again, and Hux had said, “Do we have to have sex tonight? It’s been such a long day, and another one tomorrow. Let’s just cuddle, it’ll be fine”; and so they had, and it _was_ fine, he was right. But — still.

Hux shakes his head against Ben’s chest. “No. I’m sorry, Ben, I know we planned it, but I’m just not feeling up to it tonight. Nerves, I suppose. Another time.” A pat on Ben’s chest, like a participation prize.

Ben is oddly stung by this. He doesn’t care about the sex, but that pat: like pity. “It’s fine. Yeah. Don’t worry. They don’t expire til, like, 2022. I’ll ask you again then, okay?”

The wrong thing to say. An awkward exhale-laugh from Hux, the thing he does through his nose when he doesn’t really think something is funny. _Good at office parties,_ the wry tilt of his mouth. “Mm. Sure.”

He hates talking about the future. No: not _the_ future; not his own. Certainly not. He has that all planned out, has done since he was twelve. No. Just _their_ future. He just doesn’t like to talk about theirs.

“Okay.” That sinking feeling in Ben’s stomach again; he’s pulling away, he’s pulling away. Ben is tired, so tired all at once; he wants to stop thinking. He wants to realise that he’s being stupid. He wants Hux to tell him this. He won’t, so Ben figures his best hope is sleep: maybe in his dreams.

He reaches out for the fairy-lights’ cord, tugs on it to grab the switch; he must jostle Hux as he does; he murmurs with displeasure. “Sorry. Almost got it.” His thumb on the button; the room, dark. “Night, Hux.” Another kiss to Hux’s red hair, the smell of his expensive, imported shampoo.

“Goodnight, Ben.” Absent stroke of a finger down his arm. So brief he almost doesn’t feel it. Already, Hux’s breathing, deeper.

Ben waits a moment, like he always does, as if waiting for permission.

“Love you.”

Slow breaths. Silence. A moment, heartstrings, half-holding his breath like he does every time.

The relief, potent as ever, with the murmured, sleepy response:

“Love you, too.”

Are the stakes always this high, between admission and reply?

 

* * *

 

“How was your day?”

“Shit.”

The dinner table in their new-ish condo, seating four but never occupied by more than the two of them. Ben thinks sometimes how small their circle is — himself, Hux; one or two friends each, who only exist outside this flat. A fishbowl world. When painting got too tiring today Ben cooked, hoping Hux would be happy to come home to something that wasn’t microwaved or take-out.

(The only thing he said when he came home, hours later than he said he’d be, dropped his bag at the door, and smelled the curry on the stove was, “Oh, I really do prefer masala.”)

Ben raises his eyebrows. “You’ve said every day this week has been shit. It can’t possibly be that bad.”

“It can, and it is.” Hux stabs a piece of butter chicken with particular violence and sighs. “Have I discussed with you my theory that poli-sci grad school is a Ponzi scheme run by a bunch of sadists who’ve never won an election and have instead turned their energies to getting off on watching the light slowly being sucked from young hopefuls’ eyes?” His voice is utterly deadpan.

“You may’ve mentioned it.” Ben smiles slightly and reaches to pat the hand that isn’t holding a fork the way most people would hold a dagger, if most people held daggers ever in their lives. He’s pleased, despite Hux’s griping: if Hux is making jokes, he’s in a decent mood.

Far better this than the stony silence and grunted responses that have characterised most of their interactions since the semester started. Ben thinks longingly of this past summer, when they were still riding high on the post-grad, new-apartment buzz. Sure, Ben spent most of his days alone while Hux worked long hours at his fancy internship, moping around the house and occasionally putting brush to canvas, only to immediately regret the results — but Hux was happy, and when Hux is happy, Ben is too. Symbiosis. Not the parasitic kind.

“How was _your_ day?” Hux tears off a piece of naan but doesn’t eat it, reaching for his glass of wine instead. Cheap stuff: his mouth twists when he takes a sip. Ben winces. He knows it’s not as good as what Hux likes, but he’d chosen a Riesling specially; Hux’s favourite, a Friday treat to cheer him up. Obviously it didn’t work.

“Fine,” Ben answers. He glances at the covered canvas in the corner of the kitchen, his makeshift studio. The painting is almost finished; he doesn’t like it, but Hux’s boss seemed to, when Hux showed her an early picture, so Ben’s going to sell it to her. They need the money badly. All day as he worked on it he mentally chanted _sell-out, sell-out, sell-out_ to himself. “Got some work done on Christine’s piece.”

“Christine’s piece?”

Ben nods.

Hux sets down his glass, an awkward look on his face. “Right, Ben, shit, I forgot to tell you. Her husband found another painting that’ll fit better in their living room; they’ve already bought it. Sorry.”

“Seriously?” Ben’s fork and knife still on his plate and he looks at Hux in incomprehension. “I was…counting on that. For rent this month. God. _Shit.”_

“It’ll be fine. We’ll cancel Netflix.” Hux is tearing the naan into smaller and smaller pieces. His voice is petulant, like a child refusing to admit that he’s wrong. He won’t look at Ben.

“I did that last week.”

“HBO?”

“We haven’t had it since _Game of Thrones_ ended. And anyway, it wouldn’t make a difference; we need a lot more than that.” Ben looks at Hux in dismay. “Can’t we borrow some money from your stepmom?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not. She hates me.” _I hate her,_ Ben knows he means.

“Well, can’t you two get over yourselves? We need cash. Elizabeth is loaded, and she’s not doing anything with all your dad’s money except, like, buying antique chairs and shit.”

Elizabeth Ellingford-Huxley is a very kind, very dignified, very wealthy middle-aged Englishwoman who likes Ben very much. Hux hates that she does. The one time she was in town and took Ben out for brunch, Hux found out and gave Ben the cold shoulder for a week. He deleted her number from Ben’s phone and won’t give it back.

This isn’t the first time they’ve needed money and could easily have turned to her — Ben knows she wouldn’t mind, would hardly blink at the loss of a few hundred bucks for the rent on their shitty condo. But Hux is a child when he’s angry and right now it’s going to get them both in trouble.

“I’m not going begging to Elizabeth.” Hux saws off another piece of chicken and chews it with vehemence. There is sauce on his lip and it looks like blood.

“Can I, then? She’d help us out. Come on, Hux, be reasonable.”

_“No.”_

A brief silence.

“Can’t you stop dry-cleaning your suits, or something?” Ben asks, unwilling to let the issue drop.

Hux looks up. His words are clipped and cold. “I need my suits. For my career, Ben. You don’t get it.”

Ben’s temper flares. “You’re still in school, you’re a TA; what career, exactly, are we talking about?”

“I have more of one than you do. When was the last time you made a sale? And if we’re so desperate for cash, then how about you stop slashing up all your canvases when you don’t like a painting?” Hux gestures furiously with his fork to the uncovered paintings sitting forlorn and guilty against the wall, canvases hanging in painted shreds. “Those are expensive. Your fucking temper tantrums are expensive.”

Ben’s temper boils. “You don’t —”

He breaks off, unable to get his thoughts into words. Hux is right, of course he’s right, Hux is always right, isn’t he? Ben should stop cutting up his paintings. Ben cuts up his paintings because no matter how good he thinks they’ll be when he’s painting them, when they’re finished they look nothing like what’s in his head, and he can’t stand it. He can’t stand to look at them. He takes an X-Acto knife to them and feels better. Maybe they look too much like what’s in his head, maybe that’s the problem. He’d take an X-Acto knife to that too if he could.

“You don’t get it,” he says. Hux is waiting in infuriating, expectant silence for him to finish. “That’s hardly our biggest problem right now. Our biggest problem is that I made a sale to _your_ boss, except now she’s changed her mind and you didn’t even _tell_ me, and the rent is due in five fucking days and where are we going to get the money?”

“We’ll find a way.” His voice is thin ice, calm and deadly.

Ben finds his hands have balled into fists under the table. His food is getting cold on his plate: looking at it makes him feel sick. _“What_ way, Hux? For God’s sake, if you have some secret backup plan, feel free to let me know. We’re supposed to be in this together.”

Ben prepares himself for backlash from Hux — an onslaught of cool arrow-tipped words, aimed precisely at his heart. But instead, Hux wavers, and closes his mouth, setting his fork down with a clatter.

“I know,” he says, disarmingly quiet. “We are. We are in this together, Ben. I promise. I just…I’m so stressed right now, and they’re not paying me enough at school, and I…” He sighs. “I’m taking it out on you. I’m sorry. Call Elizabeth, if you want. If we need to.”

“Really?” Ben doesn’t know what is more surprising, the apology — admission of fault — or the concession to necessity, no matter how disagreeable. Admission of weakness. Hux doesn’t do that.

Hux nods. “You’re right. She won’t mind, especially not if it’s you asking.”

“She doesn’t hate you, Hux.”

“She’s not my mother.”

“Still.” Ben rises, takes his plate to the compost and scrapes the rest of his food in, rinsing it off and putting it to soak with the rest of them: no dishwasher, obviously. He can feel Hux watching him, eyebrows raised — now is not the time to be wasting food — but he can’t eat any more.

“If you’re sure it doesn’t bug you too much, I’ll call her,” he says, coming to sit back down. He notices how his tone has changed: it’s as if he’s apologising, now, as if he was the one putting obstacles in their way. It’s unnerving. What’s worse is he knows this isn’t the only time this has happened — far from it. “You’ll have to give me her number back,” he adds, as un-pointedly as he can.

Luckily Hux doesn’t take it as a slight. “I’m sure. I will. It’s what we need to do.” He sighs, pushing his rice around on his plate. He rests his chin in his other hand; have his eyes always been so darkly shadowed?

“Is everything okay, Hux? Besides school being a Ponzi scheme. And sucking. And us not having any money. And Lady Olenna being dead.” Ben forces a smile. “Is that it?”

“Oh, Olenna,” Hux replies dryly, putting one hand to his heart. “That’s where all this started. Nothing’s been okay since then.” He smiles back, tiredly. “No. That’s it. There’s — nothing else. Reading week’s soon; I just need a break. A reset button. I’m fine.” He touches Ben’s hand before getting up to discard the rest of his plate, too.

“Okay. If you’re sure. You can talk to me, you know. Always.”

“I know. I’m sure.” Hux slides his plate into the sink.

“You wanna go to bed?”

“Yeah.”

The bed is more of a futon, really, hardly deserving of the name; the ground can be acutely felt beneath it. Hux allows a few kisses, Ben’s hand on his ass under the covers, their legs tangling like thread. He allows a few more, and then Ben’s pulling his shirt off, gently, and he’s allowing that too. Ben’s starting to get hopeful.

They haven’t had sex in a while — a long while, actually, ten days or more. Ben thinks the last time was when Hux interrupted Ben’s shower, dropped to his knees, and gave him head one morning, which would have been much sexier were it not for the rigid scowl on his face while he did it. They’d been fighting, again — starting early, as soon as they’d woken up; a bad day — and it felt more like a _take this and shut up_ kind of manoeuvre than a spontaneous act of affection. That was the last time, Ben’s sure of it.

Hux’s shirt is off, and Ben’s hands are moving to the buttons of his slacks, and he allows that, tonight, too. As they kiss, Hux moves, lazily, to unzip Ben’s sweater, and Ben’s heart starts pounding in anticipation, _maybe everything’s okay after all,_ but then Ben opens Hux’s fly and reaches for his cock and Hux stops.

He stops, and opens his eyes, and pulls back. His hand stills on Ben’s zipper. His eyes are cool and clear, not dark and lust-hazed like they get sometimes (a good day), and that’s how Ben knows he was wrong.

“I don’t want to do any more tonight. I’m sorry, Ben, I’m just tired.”

Ben frowns. Hux has told him that when he’s sad or disappointed, he pouts, like a kid, and he didn’t mean it kindly. He tries not to do that now. “Really?” he can’t stop himself from saying, ten days of distance piling up and spilling over. “Again?”

Hux’s brow wrinkles, a ripple of displeasure crossing his face. “Yes, again,” he repeats curtly. He moves back from Ben on the bed, re-buttoning his slacks, which is pointless because they’ll be going to bed soon _(now, apparently)_. “I don’t always have to have a good reason not to sleep with you.”

There’s acid in his tone and Ben flinches from it. Hux sees. His mouth twitches in a way that might be regret (but could just as easily be disdain), and he turns away and begins, methodically, to strip and dress for bed. “Not tonight,” he repeats, his tone closed.

Ben shouldn’t be surprised. “Okay,” he says, hollowly. He, too, takes off his clothes — he sees there’s paint on his shirt, the perfect shade of lavender he’d mixed up for Christine’s painting, and he crumples the shirt up and shoves it far down into the hamper.

Hux is already climbing under the covers as Ben changes his boxers and finds a sleep shirt, and by the time Ben joins him, he’s lying back on the pillows and closing his eyes. Funny how that slight frown never leaves his face anymore. Ben thinks it used to, sometimes.

Even if Hux doesn’t want to do anything else tonight — as he didn’t last night, and hadn’t wanted to the whole week before that, and was that thing in the shower ten days ago or more, did it even happen at all? — Ben hopes he’ll still let him do this. Tentatively, he reaches for him.

“Come here,” he says, and for a moment, Hux does. He exhales the smallest sigh when Ben wraps his arm around his chest. He’s always the little spoon — he told Ben once it made him feel safe; Ben thinks that might be the only indication of human vulnerability Hux has ever given him.

They stay that way a few minutes, Ben’s eyes sliding shut — and then Hux shifts, and says, “I’m too hot, Ben, I need to move.” Wriggling out from his embrace, turning his back, closing his eyes. Tight shut.

Ben closes his eyes, balls his fists under the covers where Hux can’t see them. Invisible despair. “Hux, seriously. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. I’m fine. G’night.”

Ben relents. He believes him. He does.

“I love you, Hux.”

“Mm. You, too. Night.”

Ben’s heartbeat calms. Small solace.

“Night.”

 

* * *

 

“I’m going to drop out of school.”

A rare night home together, Ben sprawled on the couch and Hux sitting upright in the armchair in the still-spotless living room of their new condo. Ben is lying on his back, holding _What I Loved_ in one big hand with his thumb pressed in the middle of the spine, turning the pages with the other — but when Hux speaks, he almost drops the book.

“You’re _what?”_

Hux looks at him over the rims of his reading glasses and the top of _At Swim, Two Boys._ He picks up his leather bookmark, marks his place, shuts the thick novel, and lays it aside. He nudges his reading glasses up his nose with one finger and then folds his hands in his lap: clearly this is going to be A Discussion.

“I’m dropping out. The magazine has offered me more work if I have more time to do it, and they don’t need me to have anything more than a bachelor’s degree. They’ve mentioned giving me my own column at some point. I’ve accepted their offer.” He says it matter-of-factly, with just a hint of self-satisfaction: _Yes, this is how it should be._

“But your TA job,” Ben blurts stupidly, knowing as soon as he says it that it’s a futile point.

 Hux has grown to hate teaching, and comes home stewing every day about the incompetence of undergraduates and their lack of respect for the institution and its representatives, himself included. He enjoys grading papers (read: verbally eviscerating nineteen-year-olds) but by this point that’s about it. His new job — writing the occasional scathing political feature for an up-and-coming online magazine — is proving much more rewarding, both financially and mentally; but they can’t afford to lose any source of income.

“I hate it,” Hux replies, as Ben knew he would. “And I’ll make enough without it; it barely paid anything anyway.”

“Paid. So you’ve already quit.”

Hux nods, almost defiant. “I went down to school today and started the process of leaving. They were angry — _it’s late in the semester, where are we going to find someone else, you’re a valuable asset, Mr Hux, and so close to finishing your degree”_  — his voice mocking, almost cruel. “There’s no shortage of cash-strapped grad students; they’ll be fighting tooth and nail for the job, even if finals are only a month away. They’ll find someone.”

“But you like school,” Ben reminds him, still reeling from the sudden announcement: for all his complaining, Hux had never made any indication that he actually wanted to leave academia yet. He’d even talked about continuing on to do his PhD, Ben is sure he had — or did Ben suggest that himself…? “Are you sure the magazine will give you enough to fill your time? You’ll get bored if they don’t.”

Hux shrugs. “They seem confident that there will be enough work to justify giving me full-time hours, if not right now then in the near future. And you know they pay well already; look around.”

He gestures to the condo, in which they’ve lived for barely three weeks: Hux had only been working for the magazine for three months on a slightly-glorified-freelance basis when he decided that their old place was too shitty and they had to move somewhere else, and with his new income — plus the funds from the startlingly successful sales and showings of three of Ben’s new paintings — they’d been able to, ending up here, downtown, in a place where Ben feels uncomfortable (too small-town, not hip enough), but where Hux seems right at home.

(The futon went straight to the trash when they moved out. Their new, fashionable bed with its fancy custom-engineered mattress is so big that if they so choose, they can sleep so far apart that they don’t touch, even mistakenly, all night.

Thus far, Hux has so chosen.)

“You have the Berlin contract,” Hux reminds Ben when he is silent, casting helplessly for words, for reasons. “That should make up for my TA salary, and then some.”

He’s right; of course he is.

Ben’s unexpected sales last month had been to a small gallery in Berlin which had somehow found his stuff online and liked it. They sent him an incredibly polite email in very formal English asking if he’d consent to have an existing work or two shown, and then paint a few more, to be featured as part of their young-artists showcase coming up this winter. The offer was manna from heaven and Ben had hardly blinked before accepting; he’d sent off the two pieces straightaway, paying the exorbitant fragile-and-international S&H fees with a feeling like what he imagines Wall Street traders must get at the start of every day.

When the cheque came in the mail, he paid their rent, his Visa bill, and the water and electric and Wi-Fi all at once — and when Hux saw, he was furious, assuming it had been with Elizabeth’s help. He had barely softened even when Ben explained the situation, beaming, relieved, happier than he’d been in weeks, finally feeling like his work was worth something — he’d just said _Well, sales like those are few and far between, and really, you should’ve asked them for more,_ not noticing when Ben’s face fell and his tone quieted again. _Don’t let them take advantage of you like that. You’re in the real world now and you have to stand up for yourself. Have some spine._

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so, but…”

Ben is at a loss. He doesn’t know why this is bugging him so much — Hux is right, the magazine has been more than generous so far, and if they feel confident in telling him that they’ll have full-time work for him, then he doesn’t see why he should disbelieve it. He’s not _attached_ to Hux’s TA job (in the early days they tried the professor/student thing in the bedroom and it didn’t do anything for either of them), and really, the extra salary it would provide is negligible at best. The Berlin gallery has promised him more money once the rest of the paintings are submitted (Hux had a hand in the new negotiations — a half-hour Skype call in which his perfect college German was finally put to use — and triumphantly extorted a heftier sum while Ben stared at the tabletop and wished to disappear.)

There’s no reason the new job should be upsetting him so much. Except:

“But you’ll be busier,” he finishes his sentence, looking unhappily at Hux. As it is, he only teaches three days a week: long days, sure, with early mornings, and late nights spent marking papers — but he gets Tuesdays, Thursdays, and weekends off. It’s not like they go on dates or do anything special _with_ that time off — Ben is long past expecting them to, although sometimes he can’t help wishing — but now he’ll have even less of it. “You’ll be working all day, five days a week.”

“They might want me nights or weekends, too,” Hux corrects him automatically. “Probably won’t be nine-to-five.” This doesn’t sound like it bothers him.

“Well, then.” Ben gestures hopelessly. “I’ll never see you.”

The words sound so pathetic when he says them that he immediately regrets opening his mouth. He clamps down his jaw as Hux frowns, and looks at him as if _seeing_ him for the first time all evening — and he doesn’t seem to like what’s in front of him.

“No,” he agrees, coolly. “At this point in my career, sacrifices are going to have to be made. I won’t be at home as much as I am now.” He cocks his head. “Won’t that be good for you? I thought you painted better undisturbed.”

He makes the seemingly neutral words sound like an accusation. Ben flushes. “Yes,” he murmurs, as if it were shameful. He does work better alone, he always has —  _but I’d rather have him around._ He can’t say this aloud. Something about Hux’s mood tonight tells him that those words would make him laugh his cold, sharp laugh, and if Ben hears that he will crumble.

“So we’re fine, then.” Hux’s eyes are expectant; he doesn’t think Ben will argue, Ben can tell. And he’s right. He won’t. He never does.

Ben nods, slowly. “We’re fine.” The words are dull.

“Good.” Hux stands, takes up his book. “I’m for bed.” On his way out of the living room he stops and deposits a kiss on Ben’s hair. It’s perfunctory, rote, with no feeling behind it. All at once Ben feels the hot prick of tears in his eyes. “Night.”

“Night,” Ben returns, weakly. And then, because even through all this it’s still true: “I love you.”

By now Hux is too far away to hear him, quiet as he spoke. The bedroom door shuts, down the hall. Ben pitches forward in his chair as the tears start streaming down his face, gripping his knees and trying not to make a sound.

_Why does he do this? Why do I let him?_

In truth he doesn’t know why they haven’t broken up yet. He barely knows why they’re together in the first place — proximity, he’s always thought, in the dark moments like these.

They shared a room for three years; once they found out they were both into guys, sometime midway through the first one, it was essentially inevitable that they’d hook up. What could be more convenient, especially being who they were: a gangly, awkward art student whose panic attacks often prevented him from leaving his room, or his depression from leaving his bed; and a workaholic snob whose sharp tongue and seemingly complete lack of empathy for, or interest in, other human beings and their emotions ensured that he made few friends, much less attracted lovers?

Proximity. That’s all. Some days, like today, Ben is almost certain of it. What does Hux see in him? What has he been for Hux, ever, other than a decent body and a decent cock and someone who’ll let him belittle him and never, never fight back? Ben is weak and pathetic and he knows it; he knows Hux knows it, too.

 _He’s told you he loves you,_ the last vestiges of his dignity pipe up. _He can’t have been lying every time._

 _Can’t he?_ Ben argues. All he knows is that he loves Hux desperately and wretchedly and if he could have stopped by now he would. On the other side — he cannot say.

Hux is a creature of habit. Even if he loved him once and has since stopped, the effort of breaking up, moving out ( _kicking me out,_ he corrects himself), meeting someone else, and starting the whole process over is just too tedious for him. At this point it’s easier to keep Ben around and use him as a metaphorical punching bag when he needs to.

And at least it _is_ only metaphorical —  _well, most of the time._

With his eyes tight shut and blood rushing to his head, Ben remembers with sudden clarity their third night in this new place. Hux had come home from work — stormed in, really, slammed the door — Ben had looked up from his painting in the kitchen, his hand clenching around the brush in surprise. “Hux,” he thinks he’d said, his brow furrowing, maybe asked, “What’s the matter,” but Hux had dropped his things and crossed the room with something dark in his eyes. He reached for Ben and without a word took him to their bedroom.

“Undress,” Hux told him roughly, and proceeded to do the same, nearly ripping the buttons from his expensive shirt, fumbling with the belt-buckle and button-flies of his trousers, as Ben, dumbly, peeled off his own paint-stained T-shirt and jeans, stepped out of his boxers, and sat down on the bed.

Hux straddled his lap, pushed him onto his back, and kissed him once, Ben thinks — angrily, and with distraction — before reaching into his bedside table and pulling out lube, a condom, and a pack of cigarettes and a matchbook that Ben hadn’t known were in there. Hux has been trying to quit smoking for years, which is how Ben knows he isn’t really trying. As Ben watched, not daring to speak, Hux slid on the condom and told him, “I’m going to fuck you.”

Ben found himself, to his numb surprise, already hard. He nodded, and obediently lay back and reached for the lube, opening himself with a wince: it had been a long time. Hux watched him, impatiently, one hand moving on his cock with a strange careless detachment; and when Ben said, “I’m ready” (he wasn’t, not quite), then Hux paused, and lit his cigarette. He stowed the matchbook and pack in the drawer.

With the cigarette between his lips, he climbed atop Ben and pushed inside him. Ben stifled a noise of pain. Hux took a deep drag and made no indication that he’d heard.

“Are you okay?” Ben asked tentatively, as Hux blew out the smoke and seated himself deeper and Ben shifted his hips to accommodate him. In theory, nothing was different about this — Hux likes to fuck, Ben likes to be fucked; Hux is not always a patient lover, they’ve done this before — but at the same time everything was, and Ben didn’t know _why._

“Fine,” Hux bit out. His face was strange, distant, closed. A red X blinking like a lane on the bridge you can’t drive in. “Shut up.”

Ben did. And as he did, his breathing growing shallower as he clenched and moved around Hux, Hux smoked in bitter silence. He closed his eyes. He exhaled a thin stream of smoke, his pale thighs pinning Ben’s hips down. There was anger traced in the lines of his high, furrowed brow, anger whose cause Ben did not know and thus assumed to be himself.

He seemed to have been proven right, because next thing, the words started. Cruel words traced in clouds of smoke, grey words that were chased away by their panting breathing. Obviously they lasted longer than that, because Ben still remembers them now.

 _Slut,_ Hux called him, and it’s not like he hadn’t before. But then: _Useless. Worthless. Pathetic,_ he said, astride him, inside him like he’d conquered him. _Failure. Disappointment. Nothing, nothing, nothing._ The words with the rhythms of his thrusts, as he drew himself out and sank back in again, the ash falling off the end of his cigarette to land, hot, on Ben’s bare skin.

Ben remembers he’d wanted to cry. Not because of the words. Their bedroom talk is often rough, but still, they’d crossed a line that day (or Hux had) — but that wasn’t the reason. Ben had wanted to cry because he knew the words to be true; and worse, he liked to hear them.

He hadn’t really thought about it until afterwards. _What kind of sick am I,_ he wondered, _if that’s what gets me off_   — and then, right after: _What kind of sick is he?_

Spurred on, unwillingly, by the cold taunting, Ben had felt himself close to the edge, and warned Hux, his voice sticking in his throat: “I’m going to come.”

“No, you aren’t,” Hux said, and ground the cigarette out on Ben’s chest. “Not until I have.”

Ben, quietly, once his scream had subsided: “Okay. Okay.” Clenching his stomach, trying to hold in the tide, feeling dizzy and sick and the new burn howling and his own arousal, more powerful and shameful than anything he’d ever felt before.

And then Hux smiled — the first time he had all night — and pulled out of him, sliding the condom off to come onto Ben’s chest and stomach and thighs. He stroked himself through it with the hand that had held the cigarette and his spend mingled with the ash on Ben’s skin.

 _Mixing pigments,_ Ben thought absurdly, and then came shouting, Hux’s fingers pressing into the wound.

He doesn’t know why he remembers this now. Maybe because they haven’t had sex for weeks now, not the hurried kind, nor vindictive, nor even whatever that time was with the cigarette. They have never descended that low again and Ben is almost disappointed.

 _Disgusting,_ he thinks. And it is, isn’t it? Foul. Depraved. To want to be reminded that you’re nothing, that you’re worth nothing, that all of your work has been for nothing; and to be excited by it, to take comfort. He hadn’t even minded the burn. The scar, a shiny penny on his chest — he finds himself caressing it in front of the mirror when he’s in the bathroom alone.

_There’s something wrong with us. Something very wrong._

Ben gets up from his chair before his thoughts can turn any darker. He goes back into the empty kitchen; he turns the light back on; he finds a fresh canvas, mixes new colours; and he paints. The Berlin gallery will like this one, he thinks.

 

* * *

 

 

“Have you thought about what you might want to do in Berlin? Is there anything you want to see? And did you look at the links to the Airbnbs I sent you? I think it was your work email —”

“Slow down, Ben. God. Can I breathe for a second?” Hux glances up at him from where he’s just sat heavily down in a kitchen chair, his face buried in his phone. He hasn’t even taken off his jacket or shoes; his damp umbrella hangs over his arm. He’s frowning down at the screen, obviously displeased.

“Problem at work?” Ben asks, abashed. He hadn’t meant to assault him, but the trip to Berlin is rapidly approaching and there’s too much still up in the air for his liking. When he’s brought up these questions before — where to stay, what to do, how long they want to go for — Hux has always brushed him off, saying he’s too busy, they’ll talk later.

After spending all day today in an anxious flurry, unable even to paint — wanting to start booking rooms and making plans but unwilling to do so without confirmation from Hux, knowing he’d be angry later — Ben had finally unleashed the torrent of his worries almost as soon as Hux walked through the door. But obviously this approach isn’t working, either.

“Yes,” Hux says tightly. His eyes are still glued to whatever breaking news or urgent interoffice communiqué is pulled up on his Galaxy’s screen. “I might have to go back into the office tonight, or maybe even downtown — they want someone on this story —”

“Can’t anyone else go?” Ben’s voice is too plaintive.

Hux looks up, annoyance flashing in his eyes, a retort no doubt ready on his tongue; but then he stops.

“Yeah,” he says, not quite reluctantly. “Yeah. Ah…” He looks down at the screen again, heaves a sigh. “Camilla’s available; she’s just emailed. Michael asked me first, but she’s closer…”

“Stay in,” Ben pleads. (Has he always had to beg for this, he wonders, for time with him, for attention from him, for _him?_ And if not always — when did it start? When will it end?) “Just tonight. Please, Hux. There’s a lot of stuff we have to talk about. For the trip.”

Unconsciously he invokes _the trip_ as if the words themselves were magic. And maybe they have become imbued with some kind of power, at least to Ben. In Berlin, he has somehow come to imagine, they’ll sort everything out. Hux will take a break from his never-ending work; Ben will receive attention for his, and prove to himself — and to Hux — that what he’s doing with his life is worthwhile.

Ben has checked: one of the Rachmaninov piano concertos is being performed at a church in Mitte. It’s not Hux’s favourite, but he’s bought tickets anyway. They’ll walk around the old cobbled streets and Hux will break out his impeccable accent and do all the talking for them. They’ll go to the Gemäldegalerie in the afternoons and drink good beer in dim-lit bars in Kreuzberg at night.

Hux will come home invigorated, Ben will come home inspired, and they’ll be… better. They will. Berlin will fix things.

“The trip,” Hux repeats. “Yeah. I saw your emails.” He sets down his phone, exhales, and takes the umbrella from the crook of his arm. He stands and undoes his wool coat and hangs it by the door. He takes off his shoes. “Wine?” he asks Ben, and goes stocking-footed to pour for each of them. “What’s for dinner?”

Ben can’t relax yet. Hux is being far more cooperative than expected, but it feels like the other shoe still has to drop. “I thought leftovers from yesterday,” he answers tentatively. “Is that okay?”

“Fine,” Hux says. He hands Ben a glass of merlot, drags a chair over to Ben’s side of the table, and puts on his reading glasses to look at the site open on Ben’s laptop. “First order of business?”

“The apartment. I thought this one, in the centre of town; it’s right next to a subway station — or else this one, little bit farther out but the place is less cramped…”

Ben clicks through the different tabs, seeing, in the corner of his eye, Hux leaning forward to frown at the screen, peering at the photos of the different apartments. He looks invested — he looks like he actually cares. Ben begins to feel hope.

“Well, which is closer to your gallery?” Hux, ever the pragmatist.

“They’re kinda equidistant. And it’s not _my_ gallery.” Ben flushes, and points: “I like this one a little better. Look at the art on the walls, it’s amazing.”

“Cute,” Hux murmurs, and touches Ben’s hand where it rests next to the computer. He keeps flicking through the photos, quietly reading the descriptions of each flat to himself.

Ben realises that that little brush of his hand was the first time Hux has intentionally touched him in days, if not longer. Squeezing past him in the bathroom or the kitchen as if to shrink into the walls. Sleeping like he’s in a coffin, where he used to — he definitely used to — splay out one arm to rest somewhere near Ben, if they weren’t holding each other in the first place. Passing him things gingerly, leaving plenty of space between their fingers.

Ben doesn’t know how he hasn’t felt these not-touches like nettle stings each time.

But he’s touched him again. _That means something. Doesn’t it?_

“I like the second one,” Hux decides. “So we’ll have to walk a little for the underground, but that’s all right, isn’t it? It’s in a lovely part of town. Lots to see.”

“Really? You’re sure?” Ben was fonder of that flat, too, but he’d envisioned resistance from Hux, griping about the uphill walk to the metro, navigating the smaller station with suitcases and no elevators.

Hux nods. “Positive. Shall we?” And he takes the laptop and begins booking their stay.

“Okay,” Ben says softly, and realises he’s smiling, in bewilderment and relief. He watches Hux go efficiently through the reservation process, leaving a politely-worded thank-you-in-advance for their hosts; and when he’s finished, Ben says, “Hey.”

“What is it?”

Ben leans forward and kisses him. “Thanks.”

“What? Didn’t think you could do that yourself?”

It was a short kiss, and Hux was the one who pulled back first; but he allowed a kiss at all, and that’s more than can be said of him lately. That’s _something._ Ben takes heart, too much heart, and tries not to think any more about it.

“No, that’s not it,” Ben says. “Just — thanks for making this easy.”

“We aren’t done yet, are we? What’s left?”

Hux is all brisk efficiency and sometimes (often) Ben hates this but right now he loves him for it. In less than half an hour they have tickets to a different art opening at another gallery (“Checking out the competition,” Hux said wryly), and they’re going to a wine tasting one night and on a craft-beer crawl another, and Hux has booked them a table at a fancy restaurant for the night of Ben’s show.

“Are you sure we can afford all this?” Ben worries — his own list had been calculated down to the penny, and Hux hasn’t so much as given it a glance.

“We’ll be fine,” Hux says, and there is something defiant in his tone. “Don’t worry.”

And Ben wonders if maybe Berlin has become the magic bullet for him, too.

“Okay.” Ben squeezes his hand and really it’s not _that_ quickly that he pulls away. “Dinner?”

“Please.”

They eat. All through supper Ben is on tenterhooks, waiting for Hux to change the subject from historical landmarks in Berlin he’d like to visit or revisit to why they shouldn’t be together any longer, wishing he’d done it already so they wouldn’t have spent all that _money,_ and trying not to hope that maybe the money means something good, means they’ll be okay, means Ben has been imagining things and Hux loves him for real and has done all along.

And he has almost convinced himself that this hope is not for nothing — over dinner Hux has laughed at his jokes, has poured him more wine, has gently touched his hand when it comes to rest on the table between bites. He is almost relaxed. He is almost happy. It almost feels like the old days, when Ben was sure of things, or at least he thought he was.

And then Hux lays his fork down on his scraped-neatly-clean plate, and he takes a little breath, and he says, in such a careful, careful tone, “A ‘troubled relationship’? Is that what you told them, Ben?”

Ben freezes. His heart sinks. The other shoe, at last. “What? Told who?” He winces; his voice goes defensive. _Fuck._  

“That’s what you said. To the magazine, the art one. I read it. When did you have the interview?” Hux’s gentle voice has cracks in its veneer.

Ben’s hands knot together on the table-top. Denial is going to be useless. “Last month. Two months ago. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. That’s not what I said. Sound bites. You know.”

“It’s in quotes. ‘There’s a sort of troubled relationship in my life, and that’s where a lot of the art comes from.’”

“I didn’t mean it.” Ben is lying and he knows it shows; his face is too open for his own good. He stands up and goes to the stove, feeling restless. “D’you want seconds?”

“Ben. Let’s talk about this.” Hux rises too, lays a hand on Ben’s arm.

Ben flinches. How long does it take for the most familiar touch to become alien? He shakes off Hux’s hand. “I don’t want to talk about it. Where did you even see the interview, anyway? No one reads that magazine.”

Ben had gotten a copy in the mail, complimentary, of course, and stuffed it down to the bottom of the recycle bin while Hux was still at work. He had given the interview on a bad day, a low day, and the words had spilled out, black and sick and sad; he’d regretted them as soon as the phone call finished. He emailed the interviewer about a retraction but got a polite refusal: all of it was on the record. Small publication, he told himself, minimal circulation and only in Europe anyway; Hux would never need to know.

But: the online version. But: Ben, spiralling into panic, had needed to assess the damage. But: careless, careless, all of it so careless.

 “The article was open on your laptop. Mine was dead and I needed to get online. Ben, come on.” Hux forces him to turn around and look him in the eyes. “Sit down. Let’s talk.”

“I don’t want to.” The leftover pasta is cooling on the stove, congealing in its homemade béchamel. Ben sets down the serving spoon without having refilled his bowl and finds his hand is shaking. “Let’s just forget about it. It never happened.”

“Ben. Listen to me. I want to talk about it because you’re right.”

“No, I’m not.” Ben sets down his food, he doesn’t want it. The coffee was brewed this afternoon but the pot is still out on the counter and he goes to it. Pouring it cold into a chipped mug, sloshing it over the sides; grabbing a rag, mopping too harshly. The microwave drones, loud, and Ben speaks louder:

 “I was wrong, okay? I was upset and I misspoke and they quoted me on it. Bad luck. Bad timing. Forget about it.” The microwave beeps. Door open, slamming shut; carrying the mug to the table, setting it down too hard. “We’re fine. We’re _fine.”_

“No, we aren’t. Or at least I’m not, and I’m taking it out on you.” Hux is looking at him, intently, and Ben can’t meet his gaze. “I need to tell you something.”

“It’s okay if there’s someone else.” Ben is mumbling, staring into his coffee, he’s been told it’s the same colour as his eyes. Liquid like them too. Going to spill like the trickles down the sides, staining the mug. “I don’t…I don’t mind.” The end the end he has been waiting for this and knowing it will come and he just hopes it will come quickly so he can take his loss and gather it to his chest and go away alone and begin to un-become.

_“Ben.”_

Finally he looks up and he feels pre-emptively wounded. Lined up for the firing squad. Back against the wall and six bullets, endgame.

Hux is looking at him, looking him in the eyes, if he was lying, he wouldn’t do that, would he? “Ben, there’s no one else. Is that what you — ? God. Well. That’s not it. It’s…worse than that. A lot worse, actually.”

Ben had not considered worse. He had thought he knew what was the worst — losing Hux, expecting it — and had prepared himself for that. He had forgotten how much worse there was in the world. He swallows. “Worse how?”

“Let’s sit down.” Hux takes his arm, Hux touches him, and that’s when Ben knows this is serious.

They sit down in the uncomfortable chairs next to the fireplace they don’t use. This condo is too big for them, they’re trying to grow up too fast. Hux’s gaze has not left Ben’s face and Ben is starting to feel sick. “What?” he demands. “What is it? Tell me, Hux, _fuck,_ just tell me.”

Hux takes a deep breath. He is so calm when he says, “It’s cancer. Prostate cancer, of all things. Like my father had.”

Short, abrupt, a black line dropped down the middle of their lives. Before and after.

Ben is unable to speak. The words have hit him like a bullet train, like it’s his own diagnosis, like he’s already dead. His ears are ringing. He cannot open his mouth.

Finally: “How long have you known?” His voice a small weak thing. A creature with no spine.

Hux winces. “A couple months,” he begins, hesitating, and then corrects himself: “Longer. Since…since just after we moved in here. Three days after, to be precise.” He chances a glance at Ben.

 _Three days. The cigarette._ Ben understands, numbly. “Oh,” he says. “You didn’t tell me.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

Hux has no answer. He shakes his head like shaking away a fly, and he goes silent for a moment, and Ben wonders if that’s it, if they’re going to dismiss this problem like they do every other one, and the rift between them is going to open wider still, and one day soon swallow them whole.

But:

“Biblical,” Hux says. “It’s fucking _biblical,_ don’t you think?” His voice is no longer calm; now it is acid rain, poison gas. “He couldn’t stand that I was — the way I am, and he’s passed on his disease to kill me for it.”

“You’re not going to die,” says Ben, automatic, monotone. His eyes are glued to the table, his hands around his coffee mug. When he takes them away the palms will be red, they will hurt. “You’re not going to die.”

“I might. He did.”

“You’re not him.”

“I’m enough of him for it to count. Our cells. Our DNA. It’s hereditary. The predisposition, at least.” Hux’s gaze forces Ben to look up. “Did you know you could pass on not just your life, but your death, to your children?”

He has lost his calm, finally. His voice is so sharp, so harsh, and at the same time, so full of pain; Ben can hardly stand to hear it. He grips the hot porcelain tighter even as his eyes begin to prick with tears. “You’re not going to die.”

“The sins of the father.”

“Why didn’t you _tell me?”_

It’s Ben’s voice that breaks first, at the same time as the mug handle snaps off in his hand. There is a dull crunch and they both freeze, staring at the carnage.

“I wanted to,” Hux says quietly, after a moment. “I didn’t know how.”

Ben stands up and goes to the garbage bin. He throws the handle in first, curved ceramic like a strange animal bone, and when he puts the mug in after it, the ragged edge scrapes his hand. Blood wells up. He looks at it and does nothing and returns to the table, bleeding.

“Does he know?” Ben asks.

“What? Who? My father’s d —”

“Not your dad. That guy. He drove you home the other night, a few weeks ago; it was late, I was still awake and I saw you. I thought…” Ben breaks off. His hand throbs.

It had been late, too late; Hux should have been home already, or should have texted; Ben had spent all evening painting, and when finally he emerged from his creative trance he noticed, first, that it was pitch-dark outside and, second, that he was alone in the apartment. If Hux comes home and he’s painting he’ll often leave him alone, go straight into the living room so as not to disturb him; but Ben checked, and the living room was empty. He called Hux’s name and got no response; his throat began to tighten, his heart to pound. He checked his phone: no calls, no messages.

Ben had swallowed and paced through the bedroom, the dial tone ringing in his ear, and then he saw movement on the street beneath their window. A car pulling up, unfamiliar, stopping in front of their building — Ben drew the phone, still ringing, slightly away from his ear. The passenger door opened and Hux got out: Ben’s chest clenched and released, but the relief still didn’t come. _Who is that he’s with?_

As Ben watched, Hux leaned back inside the car to say something to the driver. The bedroom window was partly open: Ben didn’t hear distinct words, just the tone of Hux’s voice. Sharp as ever — bitter, almost — but ebullient, loose somehow. Dangerous. He was drunk, Ben realised. Hux laughed, and then waved and slammed the car door. It drove off down the street: something boring, a Camaro or a Neon, and _beige,_ Ben remembers. That had disturbed him for reasons he couldn’t make sense of then and still cannot now.

Ben looked at the clock: one a.m. He looked back down at the street: Hux had disappeared, presumably into the lobby. He’d be coming through the apartment door any minute. Ben didn’t think; with the guilty instinct of a child sneaking back to bed after a midnight foray to the kitchen, he stripped off his jeans, kicked them aside, and fell limply into bed, dragging the covers over himself and closing his eyes hard. Hux came in a moment later: Ben heard his key in the lock, his step in the kitchen, the sound of a light-switch. Shoes off, bag down, getting a glass of water at the sink, that wasn’t normal, _how drunk is he, then?_ Ben thought he heard him humming. He squeezed his eyes tighter shut.

When Hux finally came into the bedroom Ben made no acknowledgement of his presence, nor did Hux speak to him, touch him, explain. He undressed in the dark, still humming — some stupid pop song, not his taste at all — and then climbed under the covers. Ben heard him sigh, contented, as he settled down to sleep. He was breathing evenly in minutes. Ben opened his eyes and stared into the dark. 

“What are you talking about? When was — oh. Oh, God.” Hux sighs. “Mitaka. From work.”

“Why were you out with him?” Hux has told him he hasn’t been unfaithful and Ben wants to believe him but if the cancer is true then anything can be. Nothing is as he knew it to be. A sea-change, tonight.

“He drove me to my appointment. With the oncologist.” Ben can hear him trying out the word, tasting it unpleasant in his mouth. “It was right after work, but then I made him take me out for drinks. I paid. I didn’t want to come home. I didn’t want to see you.”

Hux seems to realise how this sounds when Ben flinches, and hurries to revise: “I didn’t want to see you because I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t. I still don’t.” His voice sounds like an open wound, shamefully half-covered by a bandage.

“I wish you’d told me,” Ben whispers. “As soon as you knew, as soon as you found out. I could’ve — we could’ve —”

“What, Ben?” Hux asks. “What could you have done? What could we? There’s — nothing. Almost nothing.”

“Chemo?” It hits Ben so hard his teeth could rattle: hope. There is a thin layer of blood atop the torn skin of his hand, a delicately balancing pool. “Chemo. You’ll do chemo. People do it all the time. It works. Doesn’t it?”

“Not for this. Not really.”

“What, then?” Ben stares at him. Hux seems so _calm,_ so resigned — he’s accepted it, how can he accept it, give in to something like this —

“I’ve been trying everything,” Hux says, “going all over the city at all hours,” and all the late anxious nights Ben has spent alone, unanswered calls to Hux piling up on his phone, acquire meaning. “Nothing has worked. I wouldn’t want chemo, anyway.” His nose wrinkles.

Of course he wouldn’t. “Is there _anything?”_

“Surgery,” Hux says, and there is reluctance in his voice. “But it’s…expensive. Very expensive.” He looks around them. “Stupid,” he says. “We didn’t need all this space.”

“We’ll move again.” Ben’s response is immediate, he doesn’t need to think. “We’ll get rid of everything, we don’t need much, we’ll sell it all. And I’ll paint more, I’ll sell everything I’ve got; I’ll see how much the Berlin people will take — they said they might want more — I’ll make them take more, take all of it. But we’ll cancel the trip and get our money back; I don’t _have_ to be there for the show. And we’ll call Elizabeth. _Yes,_ that’s what we’ll do, we have to —”

The solution is so obvious — if money is the problem, Elizabeth will help, she always does. But Hux is shaking his head.

“I don’t want to,” he says.

Ben is struck speechless. Would he die for his pride would he die for his pride would he die for his goddamned motherfucking _pride —_

“You’re not serious,” he says, as calmly as he can, although he wants to scream it.

Hux shrugs, delicately, and the look on his face is awkward. He mumbles something about insurance, about dependent children and not being one, about no blood ties anyway so why should she, about sticking it out for as long as he can and seeing where he ends up — and Ben stands and crosses to his side of the table and takes Hux’s face between his hands, the whole and the bleeding.

“You can’t do this,” he says. “You can hide this from me and I won’t notice, apparently, and you can get other guys to drive you to the doctor’s, and you can take it all out on me when you need to” — the anguish builds in his voice and he sees how they both glance to the place on his T-shirt under which the scar lurks. “But you can’t _give up_ like this, Hux. No. God, no. You can’t do that.”

It’s so fucked-up, he thinks, that he even needs to tell him this — that Hux of all people has decided to throw up his hands and surrender because of something as stupid as _money —_ and he has the brief sick thought that it’s his father’s fault, that the weakness and passivity Hux had always scorned in Brendon is finally rearing its head in his son.

That’s what he did, Ben recalls: Hux told him the story once, when he was drunk. Brendon got his diagnosis, learned how long he had left, and retreated into his big old house to die.

But he was sixty-seven when the cancer claimed him. Hux is less than half that age. And Hux is not his father.

“Hux,” Ben says, quietly, “is it about the money? Really?”

A hard look flashes across Hux’s face —  “Yes,” he snaps, but a second too late —  and Ben knows, then, knows that whatever his father did, Hux has to outdo it.

“You aren’t him.”

“That’s not what I’m —”

“Yes, it is, but it doesn’t have to be.” Ben has begun to plead. “Hux. Hux, listen to me, _God —_ your dad was old, and he wasn’t happy, and he didn’t want to keep living. You told me, remember? You told me that after your mom died, he was never the same. Even Elizabeth couldn’t get him back how he was before. So the cancer, I think it was just an excuse —  you said so too, that one time — ”

“Shut up,” Hux cuts him off, like slamming a door. “Shut up, for fuck’s sake. You don’t know anything about it — don’t go all _therapy_ on me, Ben, Christ, _you_ of all people — I’m not trying to _out-cancer_ my father —”

“Then get treatment,” Ben says simply. “What else is stopping you?”

“It’ll change things,” Hux bites out. “How things work. Sex. Less for me than for you.” The words are a challenge.

“Okay,” Ben says, not backing down. “So we’ll deal with that when we come to it. What else? And don’t say the money.”

“The money,” Hux says tightly. “This fucking _country.”_

“Elizabeth,” Ben counters, and his own voice is cold. “You’re out of excuses. This is about your father. Don’t, Hux. Don’t kill yourself because you think it would make him proud.”

“Oh, _don’t —"_

“Am I wrong? Is that not what you’re doing?”

He’s shouting, he realises, and Hux looks at him, opens his mouth, and Ben steels himself for a screaming match like they haven’t had in months, years maybe; whenever it was that Hux learned that his quieter barbs were more effective in reducing Ben to rubble; whenever Ben learned that no matter how loud he shouted back he could not deafen the howling screaming keening of _I love him_ racing through his veins despite all odds. A hardy virus, love.

Hux does not scream. His words die on his lips and he gives a stifled sob.

All Ben’s faculties desert him. _System error,_ he thinks absurdly —  he has never seen Hux cry before, not even in college, unlikely as that sounds — he’d _heard_ him, sure, in their shared bathroom when he thought Ben was asleep. Usually around exams, when their GPAs were tallied and then Hux’s father passed his own judgement on his only son’s success. Angry sobs that almost turned into screams. Repressed fury, muted rage.

But Ben has never seen Hux weep; and he is weeping now.

“Hux. Hux, Hux, Hux. Oh, God. Hux.” His furious anguish evaporates, and Ben is at his side in an instant; and Hux is gripping his arms to stand, and then they are sliding to the floor together. The tile hurts Ben’s knees but Hux is half in his lap and clinging to him and he holds him, holds him, and they both cry.

When he can speak again, Ben asks, “How long?” He realises he hasn’t yet. He realises that the countdown could be halfway finished and he would not even know. “Did they say?”

Hux’s shoulders lift and fall, tiredly. When he speaks he sounds cowed. “Could be months. Could be years. With surgery…”

“Could be the rest of your life, with surgery,” Ben finishes for him. Trying not to elbow Hux, he fishes his phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to call Elizabeth.”

Hux grips his arm. “It’s two a.m. in England, Ben. Be reasonable.”

 _“Reasonable?”_ Ben turns a stare on him that makes Hux look away, ashamed. When have they become each other?

“Fine,” Hux says, defeated. “Call her in the morning.” There is a fraction of relief in his tone that Ben knows he is not supposed to hear.

Ben puts his phone away. His hand has stopped bleeding: it’s less bad than it had looked. “So,” he says, softer now. “We’ll call Elizabeth. You’ll go back to the doctor, and I’ll go with you.”

“No,” Hux says immediately, shifting out of his lap, looking directly into his eyes. “Please, Ben. I don’t — it’s humiliating. I don’t want you to see me that way.”

He so rarely speaks so frankly. Ben is given pause. “Hux,” he protests, but Hux is shaking his head.

“I insist. Please, Ben. I don’t — I can’t even fuck you anymore,” he repeats. “The last time we — with the cigarette — God. It’s not a good idea.”

He is struggling, trying to say something: Ben thinks he understands. The humiliation of his own body’s betrayal, redoubled by the humiliation of having Ben see him weakened, vulnerable, stripped to thin skin and a hospital gown. He hasn’t been touching him, as if they were contagious, the sickness and the weakness both.

“Okay,” Ben says. He wonders what he’s ever done to make Hux think that sex is the most important thing to him, more important than Hux’s _life,_ and hates his past self for whatever it was. “So don’t fuck me. That doesn’t matter, not anymore. Just let me be there. With you. For you.”

“No,” Hux insists. “Please. I can go alone — or Mitaka or someone else from work, they’ll take me —”

“I want to be there for you,” Ben interrupts, his voice rising, desperate. “Let me, Hux. Let me take care of you.”

Things subside — a silence, held — and then: “Don’t come with me.” Broken plea, last resort.

Ben takes a deep breath. The scraped hand’s hurt is dulling; it is late. They will bandage themselves up again in the morning and take things one day at a time. “Okay,” he murmurs. “Okay.”

 

* * *

 

They don’t go to Berlin. They get some money back, and some of it they don’t. Ben hears that his paintings are received with extraordinary praise, and other galleries start asking for more. He sends them stock emails, vague apologies and half-promises to get in touch, to paint something, at some point; but for now the priority is Hux. (Well — it always has been.)

He keeps going to work. Ben begs him not to but the look in Hux’s eyes silences his protests. Ben understands his need to keep going, to keep living, even if it tears him apart to see how Hux’s shoulders tense when he slings his work bag over his arm, to see the dark circles under his eyes that a five-a.m. alarm do nothing to erase.

He’s not sleeping well; he’s hardly sleeping at all. Ben has woken more than once to find the light on in the en-suite bathroom late at night, to hear muffled sounds coming from beneath the door. He has lain awake and listened, just like in college, as each helpless sob sticks pins into the deepest recesses of his heart. The distance between them — a few feet only — is as unbridgeable as it’s ever been, even after all these years.

He's in pain and Ben knows he’s in pain and Hux knows that Ben knows it. Ben sees the extra-strength painkillers that had always been too strong for him before but have mysteriously appeared in the medicine cabinet without comment or receipt. He sees how Hux’s jaw tenses when he excuses himself to the bathroom; he hears the toilet flushing again and again throughout the night. He almost walks in on Hux changing the sheets, sometimes once, twice in a day, and he walks out again before Hux can look up and see him there. Embarrassment does not sit well on his proud face.

Ben’s done his reading, Googled the symptoms, found all the bullshit guides for families and loved ones, everything you’re supposed to say and do and know. _Offer to help with daily tasks. Give thoughtful gifts. Continue to offer support after the initial diagnosis._ He is trying. They are both trying. He wishes he could say they are doing everything they can.

“Have you thought any more about chemo?”

“No.”

“Elizabeth says she can help —”

“No. I don’t want to feel any worse than I have to.”

“It’ll help, Hux, you know it’ll help — it extends the chances of survival –”

“I’m not dying yet.”

(Ben does not want him to keep waiting until he is.)

“Surgery, then. You said you’d think about surgery. Elizabeth —”

“Is Elizabeth my mother? Are you? I’m an adult. I’ll make my own decisions.”

 _I’ll kill myself on my own terms,_ it sounds like _._ “Please, Hux.”

“Not yet, Ben. For Christ’s sake, not yet.”

This discussion is repeated at least twice a week. There is no shouting anymore, they are too weary. A stalemate: their own western front.

An armistice one weekend. Friday night: for the first time, Hux listened, and stayed home from work when Ben begged him to. He needed it, Ben could tell, and finally gave in. Ben went out, did errands, walked in the river valley for an hour or two until his head felt clear again. (He’s not sleeping either, anymore.) He comes home to find Hux at the kitchen table on his laptop, his phone pressed between his shoulder and his ear. His voice is clear and efficient but his eyes are tired, so tired. He waves when Ben comes in but can’t seem to bring himself to smile.

“I know that, Nick, but it’s not happening. That line stays in. Tell Maryam I’m not changing my mind.” Even exhausted, his voice is steady and persistent. As Ben unpacks the few groceries he picked up on the way home, he hears Hux win whatever argument he’d been having — “Yes. Yes. Thank you, Nick. Tell her to come to me if she doesn’t like it, and I’ll buy you a drink next time I see you” — and then hang up the phone, setting it down on the table. He types a few rapid-fire lines and then says, “Hi.”

“Hi,” Ben says, shutting the freezer. “I thought you were resting today.”

“I was,” Hux says, sounding guilty, which is better than the defensiveness Ben had expected. “I slept for most of the morning, and I finished my book and took a shower; and then I got bored. Work had stuff for me to do.” He shrugs, looking too relieved to be penitent. “I did it.”

Ben smiles slightly and touches his shoulder as he passes on the way to the pantry, cereal boxes in hand. Hux is eating all these superfoods and ancient-grain-enriched things and trying to pass it off like a trendy thing to do and not yet another effort to fight the cancer himself and win. Ben shoves the quinoa cereal onto the shelf and shuts the door. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” Hux says carefully. “Pissed the bed again this morning, but what can you do.” There is shame in his tone.

“It’s not your fault.” Ben sits down across the table and lays one hand on top of Hux’s. Hux looks up at him with a brief smile.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asks. “Painting?” His voice is too casual to be truly indifferent, and it gives Ben pause.

“I thought so, yeah,” Ben answers, glancing at the art-store bag on the counter containing several fresh tubes of oils: one of today’s errands, trying to buy normality. “But I don’t have to. Why? Did you have anything in mind?”

“I don’t know. Can we just…get a takeaway, and read, or watch a film or something? Just…hang out?” Hux is affecting nonchalance and Ben can see through it. _He wants to be with me._

“Yeah. Yeah, of course we can. Come on.”

They order Chinese and eat it from the boxes, and then they go into the living room, and when Ben joins Hux on the couch, he lets him, instead of promptly deciding to move to the armchair instead. And Hux reaches automatically for the new book he’s been looking forward to starting, but when Ben says, “Movie?”, he puts it down and smiles, and he opens iTunes and pulls up the old French film they’ve been meaning to watch for months now. And when Ben suggests popcorn he gets up and makes it himself, dripping with butter how Ben likes it, and he doesn’t make any comments about anyone’s arteries or their calcifying state.

And when the popcorn is finished and Ben drapes his arm around Hux’s shoulders, tentative as a teenager on his first date, Hux doesn’t recoil and wriggle away. He doesn’t _relax,_ exactly, he doesn’t snuggle into Ben like he used to (he used to, didn’t he, he _used_ to? Didn’t he?) but he doesn’t pull away. He lets Ben touch him. Just barely, but it’s something, and these days Ben will take all the somethings he can get.

What would he do with nothing, he wonders — without Hux. What _will_ he do. If Hux persists, if this persists — if the miracle they won’t say they’re hoping for, but they’re hoping for — doesn’t come through? If he goes, for good?

In a sick way Ben would prefer to lose him like that, than to lose him as he’s always thought he would. _At least this way it wouldn’t be my fault._

He shifts, trying to shake the direction of his thoughts. Hux glances up at him, and smiles briefly, and then looks back at the movie, one hand drifting to his mouth. He’s started biting his nails again, a habit he finally kicked just after graduating from college. Ben gently lays his own hand over Hux’s, links their fingers so he can’t keep on. Hux nestles closer to him in response. Silent exchange. Their symbiosis — new, better.

For the past five years it’s been the two of them. Ben can count on his fingers the number of nights, not including miserable college summers at Han and Leia’s house, that he’s slept without Hux in the room since they met. He orbits him, he moves with his gravity, he bends to his will. Without him — will he float, or crash, burning?

Hux falls asleep near the end of the film. Ben is reading the English subtitles, squinting, trying to catch the words that disappear too quickly, when he feels Hux’s head come to land on his shoulder. He starts — he’s sure he’ll have woken him — but Hux’s lips are slightly parted, his breathing is steady and even. Ben gazes down at him in the flickering light and he feels something too big to name, too big to hold. There is a lump in his throat.

The thoughts don’t come from anywhere he recognises, but he knows them; they are his own, he cannot deny a single one.

_I won’t let you hurt yourself, but I will let you hurt me. I will let you do anything to me. I will be anything you want me to be. I am not me without you. Don’t go. Don’t ever go._

He doesn’t want to wake him up. He doesn’t ever want to move from this couch, with the film playing in the background —  _Non, laisse-moi!_ _— Qu’est-ce que tu as aujourd’hui? —_ the black-and-white flickers shadowing Hux’s face, and the childlike sound of his breathing, half-open-mouthed. This illness has made him fragile — or perhaps it has only revealed to Ben that he has been breakable all along.

Flutter of pale lashes. Squinting, frowning, head gone from shoulder. A murmur: “Sorry. I did really want to see this.” Looking up at Ben with annoyance, but not at _him,_ for once.

“That’s okay,” Ben whispers. He wants to cry.

Hux frowns at him: “You okay?”

“Let’s go to bed.” Blindly, TV off, popcorn bowl dumped in the sink. Bedroom, clothes off. Hux changes in the bathroom now, and hurries under the covers; he never says anything about it, pretends like Ben hasn’t noticed. Ben’s noticed.

Ben reaches for him, seeing again his soft face in the dim light. Hux smiles, sort of, and shakes his head: “I don’t think I can tonight.”

“Not — anything?” How to tell him that he doesn’t want anything for himself, that he only wants to give Hux whatever he will take from him. Whatever he needs. _Like I always have. Like I always will._

Another shake of the head. He turns over, curls away from him. “I’m sorry.” Breakable, but capable of breaking, too.

But Ben will not break. Not tonight. He stares at the ceiling. “Okay. Okay.”

There is a silence — Ben closes his eyes, assumes they’ll both go to sleep — but next to him, Hux shifts. There is a fumbling, and then the bedside light turns on. “Ben?”

Ben opens his eyes. “Yeah?”

Hux breathes out a measured sigh, looking down. “I called my doctor today. I told her I wanted to go ahead with the surgery.” He says it like it’s something to be ashamed of.

Relief thrums though every fibre of Ben’s body like warm light. He could exclaim, he could laugh with joy, he could proclaim, _I told you so._ Hux doesn’t need any of that. Instead, Ben smiles, and he finds Hux’s hand and squeezes it. “Cool,” he says, softly. “When?”

“Soon. Next week.”

_"How?"_

Tight shrug. “Elizabeth. I mentioned I’d be willing to pay...more than I needed to.” Ben doesn’t need to guess at his next words: “Don’t come with me.”

Sacrifice is second nature; it always has been. “I won’t.”

“Thank you.” Hux lets go Ben’s hand and rolls over, hunching into himself with unnecessary shame.

Ben lets him. “Thank you,” he says.

Hux’s hand reaches out: the light turns off: afterimage on the back of Ben’s eyelids, a negative space, not real. “Goodnight, Ben.”

“Goodnight, Hux. I love you.”

Even now, a moment’s hesitation. “Love you, too.”

Ben closes his eyes. At last, he can feel the cracks along his own edges slowly starting to mend. _One more day. One day at a time._

 

* * *

 

“How much longer, Hux? Please. If not for your own sake, then for mine.”

Good news: the surgery worked. Bad news: it didn’t work all the way. The cancer has spread, and he has no choice but chemo this time; and still he doesn’t want to go.

“I’m _fine,_ Ben, I’m doing fine — I’ll beat this on my own.”

_Like he didn’t. Like my father couldn’t._

“You’re not your dad,” Ben tells him, again, looking him in the eyes, _will he ever hear me?,_ “and you don’t have to be.”

Hux opens his mouth — Ben prepares for resistance — he gets instead defeated capitulation.

 “Fine. _Fine._ I’ll do it. I’ll go.”

Ben exhales for the first time since Hux went into the operating room.

Elizabeth will send them more money. The wire transfers take days to arrive in Hux’s bank account; Ben knows because he finds him, every afternoon, sitting at the computer with his fingers steepled, waiting for the banks to open in England. He sets an alarm on his phone to check back every hour. Ben knows it’s every hour, because Hux has had to stop going to work, and now spends all his days at home: enforced medical leave. Hux will never know that Ben called his boss to explain the situation and plead with her to make him take care of himself.

The day after his first chemo session (the bills squared away with no problem, thank God), Hux is on his knees in the bathroom, vomiting a steady stream of fluid. He does not groan or complain or curse, only lets his body rebel and heave, his fingers gripping the porcelain white-knuckled. Ben, kneeling at his side, rests a hand on his back, strokes it when Hux stops to breathe.

“This is what I didn’t want you to see,” Hux says roughly, wiping his mouth with an old towel. He won’t look Ben in the eyes. “I didn’t want it to get to this point.”

“It could be worse than this,” Ben says, steadfast. They both know it could be worse. “You’re fine. You’re all right. I’m here.”

And he is fine, mostly. He works from home as much as he’s able, but can’t go out and do interviews like Ben knows he’s itching to do; what work he _can_ do bores and frustrates him. He reads, a lot, and spends hours listening to podcasts and falling asleep on the couch. Ben wakes him up to drive him to the hospital when it’s time, three times a week, and they never speak on the ride there: Hux’s orders.

(He has also ordered Ben to leave his sketchpad in the car when he goes in to sit with him during the long painful hours. There will be no evidence of his suffering.)

Ben is painting less, drawing less, sending more and more empty words to the galleries who still want him — for now. The longer his portfolio stays stagnant, the more he can feel their attention waning. It would bother him — it would have him on his knees begging them to love him — if not for Hux; for his focus has narrowed to a single point of light that flickers dangerously close, sometimes, to going dim.

He gets better, some days. He gets worse, other days. He is tired all the time; he hurts all the time. He doesn’t want to eat, and when he does, he can’t keep the food down. He shakes as if freezing cold, no matter the weather or the temperature inside. He was already slim but he begins to look unhealthy; the bird-bones are too close to the skin. He is pale, drawn: an overexposed photograph.

(His hair, though — he keeps his hair, as bright a beacon as ever. Ben is painfully, selfishly grateful for that.)

Things are bad. Things get better. They put him on a new drug, and things get a _lot_ better, and then they get worse again; and then better. Up and down, rollercoaster; Hux has always hated those. And then one night the worst happens.

“Ben. Ben, wake up.” A gentle touch on his arm pulls him at once from sleep.

“What? What is it? Are you okay?”

It’s not the moonlight coming in through the blinds that casts the sickly pallor on Hux’s face. Something is wrong: Ben knows at once. Hux shakes his head, slowly. “I think we need to go.”

“Does it hurt?” Ben out of bed, throwing the covers to the floor, fumbling for shoes and phone and keys in the dark. Hux, he sees, is shivering, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders; his silence answers Ben’s question. “Why didn’t you wake me sooner?”

“I’m sorry,” Hux murmurs, and doubles over in pain. Ben rushes to his side, lifts the bowl that now lives on the nightstand to his lips in time. “Let’s go. Please, Ben, let’s go.”

“I’ll drive, I’ve got the keys right here — can you stand? Can you get up?” Ben is frantic; the smell of vomit is overwhelming in the close, dark room. “Here — let me help you, come on.” The drive is three-quarters of an hour across the city. Every night, once Hux has taken his painkillers and fallen asleep, Ben goes out and drives it, just in case.

Ben calls the oncologist while he’s driving, with Hux huddled up in the passenger seat, wrapped in blankets with a bowl in his lap and a dead-eyed look on his face. This is something that is happening to them: it does not feel real, they are not in control.

Thank God the doctor has her pager on. Thank God she lives nearby. She will meet them in emergency and they will find out what’s wrong. Hux is whisked away in a wheelchair, the doctor murmuring reassurances, and Ben is left in the waiting room to stare blankly at the wall. He does not have his sketchbook and he never learned how to pray.

An hour; two; the long night-hours pass. Ben dozes and his nightmares are no different than what he sees when he opens his eyes. At some point the oncologist appears like a spectre and kneels down to Ben’s eye level in the waiting room chair. _The cancer has spread farther than we thought,_ she tells him, and then a ringing fills his ears. _Didn’t he tell you?_

 _No,_ he thinks he says, and dully he registers his own lack of surprise. _What are you going to do. What can you do. Do everything, do anything._ He does not know what comes out of his mouth and what is trapped, howling, inside his head.

The doctor spreads her hands. _We wait._ Ben stares blankly at her and he does not know if he is screaming.

One a.m.: he has been here for three hours and there has been no news. The receptionist brings him a coffee that he doesn’t want but drinks anyway. As the night stretches on, the population of the waiting room ebbs and flows, changing with the hours; and Ben is still here. He needs to see Hux, he needs to know how he is; he needs to be with him, needs to let him know he’s here and always will be. He stays where he is.

Two. Two-thirty. Ben might sleep. When he wakes, nothing, still. What are they doing, and why is it taking so long? Would they tell him if things went wrong? He needs to tell Hux he loves him. He doesn’t think he has said it enough.

The endless night drags on. Ben walks laps around the waiting room, pacing, his shoes echoing loudly on the floor, until the glares from the receptionist and the other patients’ stares force him back into his seat again. He has lost all sense of time. His mouth tastes of stale coffee. How long, he wonders, would it take him to forget the taste of Hux?

He does not need to worry about that, in the end. At least not yet. Sometime before dawn a nurse comes to fetch him: “You can come in now. He’s awake, but don’t push it.”

He doesn’t thank her, doesn’t ask what went on in those long dark hours; in fact he stopped hearing her after _come in now._ He pushes past her, takes the corridor in two strides, finds the room Hux has been given, hesitates at the door. “Hux?” he calls, his voice sticking in his throat.

“Ben.”

“You’re okay,” Ben whispers, sitting down on the bed. The door clicks shut, gently, leaving them cocooned in a room lit by beeping machines.

Hux’s head rests on a plain white pillow, his hair looking thin and dull. The rings under his eyes could’ve been pressed there, inky fingerprints. The hospital gown, cheery patterned blue, is insulting. His hand — an IV taped to the back — finds Ben’s in the bedsheets. “I’m okay,” he says, quietly. “Mostly.” He closes his eyes for a moment.

“What does that mean?” Ben is tired of being left out of the equation. “What did they do?”

“More surgery,” is the listless reply. Hux opens his eyes. “The bulk of the cancer is gone,” he says, without triumph. “There are other small growths, elsewhere, that might cause problems, might not. They said we’ll have to wait and see.” His thumb drifts aimlessly across the back of Ben’s hand; his skin is cold. “It’s not over yet.”

“But you’re okay,” Ben repeats, as if insisting it, saying it again like a mantra, will make it more true. “For now. You’re okay.”

“I’m not in immediate danger. No. Not anymore.” Hux gives half a grimace. “It was close. Earlier. They said…” He sighs. “They said I should have started the chemo earlier. Before surgery, even; when it was first diagnosed. Could have saved myself a lot of trouble.”

Ben will not say he told him so. It doesn’t matter anymore. “But you’re on the right track now,” he says softly. “You’re okay now. That’s what matters.”

“Yes.” Hux’s eyes wander. They are glassy, and so tired.

“You should sleep,” Ben tells him. “You look like you need it.”

“No,” Hux says. He shakes his head, slowly. “I don’t want to.”

“What do you want?”

“Stay,” Hux says. “I want you here.”

Ben wonders how long he has been waiting to hear him say that. He climbs into bed when Hux beckons, kicking off his shoes and clambering gingerly into the too-small bed. He holds Hux, carefully, and feels how frail he has become.

“Do you want to talk?” Ben asks.

Hux does not say yes, does not say no. He may not hear him, or may not care. Ben decides to try. He wants to redeem his silences, give them retroactive meaning; ask everything he should have asked from the start. He takes a breath.

“Hux?”

“Mm?” Staring at the ceiling.

“When did it start?”

Hux looks at him. “You mean — this?”

Ben nods. Hux exhales a long, long breath. The hand not holding Ben’s goes to his mouth and he worries at one fingernail. Ben watches him, waits.

“I first started feeling…off…at the end of school. Near graduation, when we were moving out. I thought it was just stress, everything changing and all that. I was having weird symptoms, strange things I’d never had happen before, but I refused to go to the doctor’s for ages.”

That was more than eighteen months ago. Ben, again, is hit with a wave of sadness and shame. _He didn’t tell me._

“What changed?”

Hux shakes his head with a trace of irony. “On the anniversary of my father’s death I woke up and I couldn’t feel my legs. You were visiting your parents, you remember?” His words are soft, drifting; Ben strains to hear. “So I stayed in bed until the sensation came back…and then I went to the loo and there was blood in my piss and I thought, well, it’s just not stress anymore, is it?”

“Your father died in September,” Ben says. “You waited _four months?”_

He doesn’t mean to accuse — not here, not now — but disbelief tears his voice ragged. Hux looks at him.

“Yes,” he says. “I didn’t want to overreact.” He lifts his chin slightly and Ben realises how much he hates Hux’s father.

“Okay,” Ben says. “But you went to the doctor. What did they say?”

Hux shrugs. “It didn’t seem like there was anything serious, at first. Lots of things can cause the symptoms that I had. I couldn’t…you know.” He gestures between his legs. “But that’s a stress thing, too. The medicentre couldn’t do the necessary testing to determine if it _was_ cancer. They gave me a referral.” He falls silent.

“You didn’t go.”

Hux bows his head, and his shoulders heave. “Not for weeks. In the meantime I bought the condo because I thought everything would be all right,” he says, raising his head. The words pour out. “I was settled in my job at the magazine — I hadn’t had any kind of symptoms for a while — I knew I’d been pulling away from you and I wanted to make things right. I found this place and it seemed perfect and so I bought it right away, I didn’t think twice.

“And then three days after we moved in, I was pissing blood again. I took the referral and went to the oncologist with my tail between my legs and they told me what I should already have known. I watched it kill my father, after all.”

Ben can’t think, he can’t look too closely at any of this, for if he does he will shatter into pieces again. _He didn’t have to do this alone._ He swallows, grappling. “What did you do after your — diagnosis?”

“They put me on monitoring. I was going to appointments once a week, sometimes more. And outside of that, I was researching every non-chemo treatment that’s out there. Getting Mitaka to ferry me all over town. I should buy him flowers. Maybe a house.” Hux shakes his head. “I should have told you,” he says, distantly. “I regret that, Ben. Please know that.”

“I wish you had,” Ben whispers. He thinks what he’d have done differently: not asked him for sex, not pressed him with questions about the trip, the stupid trip; not assumed he was sleeping with someone else; not submitted to being hurt by him — no, that he would still have done, he knows he would; he knows no other way.

“I’m so sorry, Ben. For everything. I should have been better. I should have been better to you.”

The cancer doesn’t excuse everything: even Ben can see that. There are things — there have always been things — that Hux has done that have hurt him, and that, no doubt, he will continue to do once all this is over. Some things will get better; some things will stay the same. They are flawed. _This_ is flawed. But for the first time, Ben wonders if it is not, in fact, broken beyond repair, as he has accepted it to be for months now.

  _We’ll try. We’ll keep trying. I know I will, at least._

For now, though: Hux is fading, his words are slurring, sleep is pulling him down. Ben holds tight to him, unwilling to let him slip under, knowing he will have to in the end. “I love you, Hux. I love you, I love you.”

“I love you, too.” His head droops to rest against Ben’s chest. His breathing slows and calms.

Ben thinks of all the beds they have shared and he has the unwanted thought that this one could be their last. His throat tightens, he knows it doesn’t need to —  _but still_. They aren’t out of the woods yet. His tears wet Hux’s hair. _I won’t let him go. I can’t. I never will._

He holds his sleeping lover until sleep takes him, too.

 

* * *

 

Morning. Light peeps through the hospital blinds, butter-yellow, gentle. Ben wakes slowly. His arm is numb. There is a warm weight on his chest; he does not know this bed. The scent of disinfectant, the sickly powdery hospital stench — he remembers. He fears to open his eyes.

But he does. There: the crown of Hux’s head, sweetly tousled russet hair. It smells like him beneath the hospital fug. Ben’s arm is pinned between his own chest and Hux’s shoulders. There is a gentle susurration audible in the quiet room, amidst the beeping of the various machines, and it takes a moment for Ben to place it.

Hux’s breathing. Last night in the darkest hours Ben had feared never to hear it again. He doesn’t need to, he knows now — but oh, what a relief it is all the same.

“Hux,” Ben says as gently as he can: his voice feels hoarse and thick in his throat. “Hux, wake up.” He can feel the heat of tears rising behind his cheekbones. “Hux.”

And Hux opens his eyes; and he blinks, and shifts, and looks up at Ben; and he is breathing.

“Hi,” Ben whispers, and last night was not the last, they have been granted another morning.

“Hi,” Hux murmurs. His lips are cracked. He smiles with lucid eyes. “Why are you so happy? This bed is so hard that I dreamt I was sleeping on the floor.”

Ben huffs a little laugh. “You’re here,” he says, unable to find other words. The endless night is over, and they have made it through. There is still a long way to go — but they will keep on going. _Getting better. He will. We will._

Hux puts his hand to Ben’s face. Their gazes meet and hold. Hux kisses him, softly, sorry, and Ben kisses back forgiveness.

“I’m here,” Hux repeats, when they pull apart. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

Ben rests his forehead against Hux’s. He closes his eyes. “Neither am I.”

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> I strongly recommend both Ben and Hux's chosen reading material: [What I Loved](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/125502.What_I_Loved) by Siri Hustvedt and [At Swim, Two Boys](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/96203.At_Swim_Two_Boys) by Jamie O'Neill, respectively. The French film they watch is [_La Bête Humaine,_](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029957/) which (gasp) I haven't actually seen, but am referencing because the lines quoted here from it also appear in my favourite song of all time, [Nantes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCkT4K-hppE) by Beirut. (indulgent shrug)
> 
> As promised, all the art for this fic can be found [here](http://invadxrs.tumblr.com/tagged/a-matter-of-worse-or-of-better). Thanks to [Gefionne](http://gefionne.tumblr.com/) and [Ellstra](http://ellstra.tumblr.com/) for beta-ing; I'm on Tumblr as [huxes](http://huxes.tumblr.com)!


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